Electronic document editors are widely used in homes and businesses today. Familiar examples of these editors include word processing applications that operate on personal computers (PCs) and note-taking applications that operate on personal data assistants (PDAs). These applications strive to replace paper as the simplest means to record and communicate information. Computer technology provides these applications with advantages over paper, including the capability to vary the format of characters in a document.
A typical electronic document editor may contain a number of styles that define the format of content in an electronic document. For example, a style may define the font size, font face, font color, line spacing, and indentation of text characters entered in a location of the electronic document. The style may also include other formats, such as whether the characters should be presented in a bold font face, italic font face, underlined, or be struck through.
A user may be able to define a localized style. In this case, characters affected by this localized style may exhibit the characteristics of a specific style contained in the electronic editor in combination with some additional attribute or attributes. For example, a style contained in the electronic document editor may define the attributes of document content as font size 12 point, font face Times New Roman, color black, and single line spacing. At a specific location, a user may define a different or additional attribute, such as a text color other than black or a bold font face. A typical electronic document editor may define these localized attributes as a new style. An electronic document may contain many different styles, reflecting a combination of general and localized formatting. As such, tracking all of these styles increases the overhead of the electronic document editor computer application, which reduces the processing efficiency of the electronic document editor. Also, a user may emphasize one or more characters by applying a direct format, also referred to herein as an emphasis format. In this case, a user might use a specific formatting to make these one or more characters stand out, such as bold, italics, underlining, or a color different from the color of surrounding characters.
One strength of an electronic document editor is the capability to move or copy content from one part of the electronic document to another part or to another electronic document. However, cutting or copying content from one point in the document and pasting it at another point poses a problem in managing the many different styles in the electronic document. An issue is what formatting attributes should the pasted content have.
Certain electronic document editors currently available allow a user to choose whether the content cut or copied from a source location and pasted at a destination location should retain the formatting the content had at the source location or take on the formatting attributes at the destination location. The source location attributes are those attributes of the cut or copied text, without consideration of the formatting attributes of the text near the cut or copied text. The destination location formatting attributes are typically those attributes for the text characters after the insertion point, which marks the location where the cut or copied content is to be pasted.
This typical approach provides a very limited evaluation of the format attributes at the content source and destination locations. One reason for this limited evaluation is that computer processor limitations made a more extensive evaluation of format attributes in an electronic document undesirable. This extensive evaluation would cause a significant delay between the time a user initiates a paste operation and the time the operation is completed. However, with the increase in computer processor performance, this limitation in no longer an issue.
What is needed is a method for determining the format attributes at a region of an electronic document from which content has been cut or copied and the format attributes at a region of an electronic document to which the cut or copied content will be pasted and applying format attributes as determined by the method to the pasted content, along with any direct formatting characteristics.